


invocations

by eleionomae



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, erotic cannibalism (it's temporary), evanuris infighting: we love to see it, everyone is the worst
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-12
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:34:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24146728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eleionomae/pseuds/eleionomae
Summary: "His crime is high treason. He took on a form reserved for the gods and their chosen, and dared to fly in the shape of the divine. The sinner belongs to Dirthamen; he claims he took wings at the urging of Ghilan'nain, and begs protection from Mythal. She does not show him favor, and will let Elgar'nan judge him."
Relationships: Andruil/Ghilan'nain
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3





	1. on the philosophical implications of blindness

It is a hundred years by the reckoning of the People before Mythal comes to meet her alone in person, crashing against the two cold marble doors of Ghilan'nain's inner sanctum, each easily the density of two small mountains, until they slam backwards into the walls of the narthex like driftwood on a riptide. The impact tears them from the living rock of the chapel all around. From the vaguely spherical glow of raw kinetic energy and a massive cloud of dust that settles on the threshold of the sanctum, Mythal coalesces into flesh, her bright yellow eyes undimmed by the lamps that glow sickly green and blue here and there along the walls.  
  
This is not a place of worship. No crime against the dignity of one of the divine has been committed, and so Ghilan'nain takes Mythal's example and reduces herself into a body, a little more quickly than she'd like.  
  
"Allmother," she says, and for a moment she remembers that once she might have crumpled onto her knees, her forehead and the tip of her nose in the dust of the cave floor and counted herself blessed for the largesse of the Allmother's attention, but the memory leaves her quickly.  
  
Mythal has the knack for maintaining her immensity even in the kind of weak, soft shape fit to sit a halla. She finally crosses into the room, her steps as subtle as the distant tread of thunder, inscrutable behind her helmet, taking inventory of the bodies laying inert over countless stone tables chiseled directly out of the walls. Some so old that the bioluminescent moss that grew naturally in these cave systems had long begun to overtake her specimens.  
  
"Your cetae," Mythal snaps, the light clap of her bootheels against the stone echoing into the darkest regions of the caves that stretch into eternity as she circles Ghilan'nain, and it rankles, how indifferent she is towards the beauty of Ghilan'nain's children laid out, some with their chest cavities exposed to the open air, some in a nascent stage of transformation, reams of flesh to drape and tuck where she likes. Lumps of meat like clay to mold as she likes. The building blocks of life—cartilage, bone, blood, and her own breath to blow the embers into a flame—all here, neatly segmented in her private laboratory, a perfect mise en place. There were no supplicants here to be unnerved or awed. It had been Andruil's price. "If I must lose another ship—"  
  
"They are dead at your command, Allmother," Ghilan'nain says evenly, keenly aware of just what Mythal is capable of doing to her if she finds her response wanting. "You know, of course, that Andruil is away, but I will task her the minute she returns. In the interim I will... disable them."  
  
Physically, she wonders with a pulse of joy, or neurologically? This presents a fine challenge, though Falon'din has casually told her once or twice that Mythal considers her the least of them, that her kittenish indifference to the worth of an individual life is a danger that should have seen her sharing a prison cell with Imshael. There is nothing left in her to be bothered.  
  
Mythal grandly condescends to look across the broad, empty space of uncarved stone floors, upon which deepstalkers might have shit and left their afterbirth for centuries before Ghilan'nain ever made it what it is now, and nods before she is gone again in the space of a blink.  
  
  


* * *

  
  
She laughs with Andruil after that, when her beloved returns from whatever errand she'd been out running among her own devotees. There is a body draped over her shoulders, bound wrists to ankles and gagged, which is unusual for Andruil, who prefers to gut her kills and give the useless offal in offering to the wolves and golden lions of the wilderness; she drops the girl on an empty table for Ghilan'nain's casual perusal.  
  
"Have you anything for me?" she asks nonchalantly, unbothered by the crimp in Ghilan'nain's brow that signals that she is not pleased with the price tag tattooed on her well-formed lips that comes with the gift, but not enough to grief Andruil for it.  
  
"Only my love," Ghilan'nain says, without irony, which is code for _not yet_. After she tests the immovable give of the bindings on the body, she gently touches the girl, gently scraping off brown flakes of blood from her white cheek, one of the People, the markings of Dirthamen on her face. She is a supplicant, and Ghilan'nain is not sure she has enough standing among the others to enjoy tweaking his nose the way her wife does. "Mythal came to me."  
  
"Still angry about her warships, no doubt. How boring." There is a noise as Andruil unlatches each piece of her golden chassis until she stands in nothing but her fine underarmor, layers and layers of spider silk-fine linen held fast together by bear fat. It is light, but Ghilan'nain has firsthand knowledge that even the subtlest knife, the sharpest teeth, or the strongest crushing jaws wouldn't break the weave. "So?"  
  
Ghilan'nain looks away from her present, withdrawing her hand. The girl trembles, her quiet whimpers developing into tears and then into full-body convulsive shaking. "You alone have the right to hunt them if you like, my love, but if I must lose any more of my children for her lack of vision, I will have compensation. And then you will have your sport."  
  
"'Lack of vision,'" Andruil laughs, a timbre of real cruelty resonating in the echo, pushing another body off a stone plinth to sit. She is kingly in repose, her legs and arms spread and relaxed. "So what favor would satisfy you?"  
  
"Oh, no, not from you. This is the Allmother's affront, and I have a design that requires a great deal of subterfuge. That I can manage alone; I know you find that sort of thing tedious. But after..."  
  
"You haven't been among us so long that you could outwit Mythal, my heart, however old and preoccupied she is."  
  
"I know." Ghilan'nain leaves the tableside, kneeling between Andruil's spread legs. The scent of her flesh beneath her underarmor is the dirt of the unchanging world, and the sweat of the hunt, and death. "If all goes well, she will know my part in it, but Fen'harel is not the only one of us who knows how to play with our laws."  
  
"And I? Am I to risk myself because Mythal wounded your mortal pride?"  
  
Ghilan'nain rests her cheek on Andruil's knee, her hands kneading the immovable muscles of her thighs, for a moment paralyzed in the ecstasy of total adoration. When she looks up again, she thinks she sees a glimmer of the rich glint of madness in Andruil's black, black eyes, but even that makes her love her all the more. "No. I only ask that you do what Mythal will demand you do for the People when the time comes."  
  
Andruil seems to ponder this, then looks back down at Ghilan'nain and inclines one knee outward, and her beloved takes her cue, a supplicant, too, between her legs.


	2. interlude: the intimacy of immortals

They spend some time reacquainting. Andruil is never gone for long, but Ghilan'nain can feel a certain shift in Andruil's mood when she comes against Ghilan'nain's swollen, tireless mouth, her thigh cocked on her shoulder and knee ruthlessly digging into the back of her neck as she jerks once in her seat and the hand in Ghilan'nain's snowy hair tightens in grip so that her nails score bleeding lines into the back of her scalp. Ghilan'nain does not pause, her tongue parting her lips to nose just over and suck the hood of the nerve that could overstimulate the body if pushed too far, taking the sudden rush of musk that floods down her chin in loving stride.

When Andruil looks down again, her eyes are clearer, sharper, not as clouded by the remnants of whatever dark places she had been to in her absence. The captive behind them is still sobbing. Andruil waves a hand vaguely in the direction of a free stone lying on the floor of the cave and it launches itself across the room and strikes her in the temple, silencing her immediately.

Ghilan'nain sits back on her heels, wiping her mouth on the long and wide gold cuff that looks slightly too much like one of the arm-bonds the People use on their criminals to be a coincidence embossed in exquisite detail with several now-extinct depictions of creatures she had once made, a trinket given to her at the time of her ascension by June. It was not so much a gift as a warning that she was being watched. Ghilan'nain chose to wear it with irony, especially when she worked, and when she and Andruil loved. What could June to do her when Andruil had but to bend her bow on a whim at his forge and shatter his priests into a thousand pieces?

They tangle together on the hard, cold floor, and Andruil's nails pare her simple white dress down the center until Ghilan'nain lies naked over the fabric. She knows the depth and scope of her wife's appetites and laughs in delight at her almost bestial impatience. When Andruil's teeth, suddenly uniform in length and cut like those of the bats who live in some of the grottos deeper in Ghilan'nain's cave system, go to her shoulder and sink into her upper arm, her flesh parts around them without resistance and gladly departs the bone and slides down Andruil's throat in one ragged chunk.

But Ghilan'nain's body, temporary as it is, has nerves, and it fears death independently of her mind. She does not scream, but she comes close, wondering if this unique mesh of fear of imminent death of the physical body and the adrenaline of arousal is what drives Andruil to hunt. There is no time to linger on this thought—Andruil takes her lips with her own, her too-long teeth making bloody tracks in Ghilan'nain's soft lips and then on her tongue, and swallows her fear for her.

One hand forces itself between her legs, the heel of her hand rubbing over her vulva without much commitment, but Ghilan'nain feels herself respond—and how could she not, when she loves her so?—feeling drunk on the smell of precious blood pooling beneath her body and dyeing the now-useless linen square of her former dress a deep wine color mixing with the scent of her own arousal. Andruil pulls away from her mouth and nuzzles into her throat in a motion that is somehow both intimate in the most painful, mortal way, and utterly devoid of anything but the very animal drive to mark territory. The latter was something Ghilan'nain had always respected in her, even when she had been mortal.

"I reward my devotees well," she grinds out, scraping her teeth against Ghilan'nain's carotid, a reminder of her place both above and below her, "I will give you a queen's ransom."

There are times when she makes Ghilan'nain, wounded and dying, ride her thigh, fighting her body's death for orgasm, and times when she does not let her come at all before her body goes still and cold, but this time her fingers find the give between her thighs and begin to pump, her thumb working circles where Ghilan'nain needs it most. Her body spasms. Andruil is content to dangle the threat of ripping out her throat in front of her for the time behind, rutting against whatever she can get of Ghilan'nain between her legs—a thigh, a hip, the one hand of Ghilan'nain's that is whole enough to respond that desperately struggles to return a favor given before it falls limply to one side and Andruil twists her hand, her nails cruel and absolutely divine against the walls of her cunt.

Andruil, still bound in her underarmor, rubs the length of her body against Ghilan'nain's breasts, the linen chafing her unblemished skin raw, but it is a small, insignificant discomfort as she lays bleeding out on the knife's edge of an orgasm. Ghilan'nain's small intake of air as she feels both a creeping cold and the build to a peak begin to overtake her is enough of a sign: Andruil's fingers corkscrew out, and then in again in one fluid but brutal motion, and she bends her head and, seemingly struck by new inspiration, bites into her breast and snaps the protective bone between her molars until the hot blood that pumps outward into her wife's entire body explodes over her tongue. Ghilan'nain's vision goes white, her body seizes, complete in every way that counts, and then there is nothing.

Andruil does not drink blood for the love of blood, but she kisses the shreds of the heart beneath her mouth and extracts her hand, wiping it down on the blood-damp cloth that lies beneath Ghilan'nain's inert remains, now a muddy red that browns slowly like the trees of the unchanging world that die slowly in the time between their autumn and winter. The body is beautiful; she kisses her uninjured breast, leaving an imprint of her lips for her wife to find when she wakes again, collects her armor, and sheds her body to return to her temple.

Ghilan'nain preferred to be left to her plan, and Andruil was in no particular mood to volunteer herself for it.

**Author's Note:**

> i have not read tevinter nights


End file.
